Natalie Serber returns to her Santa Cruz hometown with a fine new collection of short stories exploring the complicated dynamic between mothers and daughters

These are great days in the life of Natalie Serber. In fact, this very day -- Thursday, June 28 -- will likely live a long time in her memory.

Today, Serber gets to play out what is merely a sweet afternoon fantasy for most writers. The Portland-based writer and teacher is coming back to her hometown, Santa Cruz, to see friends and family, carrying with her a career triumph, her new collection of stories titled "Shout Her Lovely Name."

Serber appears tonight at the Capitola Book Café to speak on behalf of "Shout," a collection of contemporary tales centered on families coping with the complications of modernity, with a strong thematic tilt toward the supercharged relationships between mothers and daughters.

"I was watching Meryl Streep speak [at a conference]," said Serber, "and she was saying, We women look at each other so closely ...' and I thought, yes, we are so hard on each other. But she went on to say that we look to each other for inspiration, and I think both are true. And that really defines the mother/daughter relationship."

Some of the stories take the point of view of a mother, others of a daughter. But a commonality surfaces -- daughters are a continuing mystery to mothers, and mothers to daughters.

The book starts with the title story, a harrowing account of a mother in the throes of dealing with her daughter's eating disorder, written in the second person -- "In the beginning, don't talk to your daughter, because anything you say she will refute ..."

"There's an implication in the word you,' " said Serber. "It's a complicated point of view and it often can't be sustained for very long. But that story is really about fear and shame and world-rocking emotions, and what you do when faced with those emotions."

There are also stories written from the point of view of a young daughter trying to understand her willful single mom. Nora and Ruby make multiple appearances in the collection, and given that Serber was largely raised by a single mom in Santa Cruz, the autobiographical aspects of those stories are hard to escape.

"There are similarities between my upbringing and the things that happened in this story, but there are things extrapolated. You have to be true to needs of the story."

The last story in the collection is a comedy about an exasperated woman with a hostile teenage daughter, a suddenly sexually active son and a husband who isn't quite all grown up. To her horror, she watches as both her son and husband unveil matching tattoos of a "mud-flap girl," those chrome silhouettes of buxom women you'll find on the mud flaps of big-rig trucks.

"I had a lot of fun writing that last story," she said.

Serber went to several local schools as a child including Gault, Branciforte and Harbor before moving on to attend both Cabrillo College and UC Santa Cruz. She credits longtime Cabrillo faculty member Kirby Wilkins for his primary role in her development as a writer. She had taken classes under Wilkins during two separate periods of her academic career and it was through him that she was to make the cut at a key writing conference that began her on her long career.

"He was a very strong influence," she said. "And certainly the kindest, most generous reader."

She also said her own mother will be a big part of her homecoming, which fits into the grand theme that runs through her book.

"We do look to our mothers," she said. "And there are things we admire and things we don't. And women all catch themselves sometimes sounding just like their mother and sometimes they're horrified. And sometimes, that's all right."